The site is all messed up (mountain climbing?)

Dark Reign

That's the site currently, and the forum is down at present, due to a virus getting onto the server hosting Dark Reign and corrupting the site software. We're currently in the middle of reinstalling updated versions of all the software used by the main site and forum, after reformatting the site to remove any trace of the virus... no thanks to the server hosts...

We'll be fully up and running again as soon as possible.

To say that it sucks is an understatement. What you're seeing now (as of the time of writing) is actually something that we were hoping to move towards in the next few months. We were just getting crossing and dotting all the "t's" and "i's," respectively. The hack and the virus infection moved this up somewhat and, to be blunt, I'm not sure that it is entirely ready at the moment. Our data remains safe, though. All the forum posts and contributions are

Thus, we have two options:

• Reinstall the original CMS and forum software to get things up and running and put the site administrator in the "comfort zone," and which would allow the slower and consistent development of the new vision of the site.
• Just create the basic functionality now and allow for the development of the site behind the scenes.

We're trying to find out what our users are wanting to do with this situation. Feel free to by DR IRChat to make your opinion known.

How was the "new" Dark Reign going to be changed? One of the things that has become clear over the last year is that people were really wanting to see a bit more flexibility for their "Actual Play" games. At presentwell, before todayActual Play took the same format as it does over many hobbyist sites. That is, games were restricted to an Ad, IC and OOC thread until it reached 50 pages, in which case it was opened up into a child fora that gave the GM the freedom to develop the game, uses different categories, etc. to run their game.

There was also an artificial split between the "main site" and the "forums." While you could visit the "main site" and see the "latest forum threads," the same was not true in the forumsthey did not see the latest contributions by the community, the commentary on that, etc. There were also a number of conceptual glitches to the forum. There was, for example, a "News and Announcement" board and "FFG Announcements" board

The new softwareDrupal (the mountains that you see are just part of the Martinelli theme, IIRC!)was going to be used to create a single, integrated site. The homepage was going to contain information pertaining to the greater part of the site in general (feeds from AP, forums, etc.), while the forums were going to receive the same treatment, with specific blocks dealing with the latest contributions. Actual Play and Projects were going to have dedicated homepages with more direct information on the latest news for that, etc. Actual Play was to be more organic, with GMs able to create custom forums on the fly for their games, moderate their players, and so forth, all of which are learning towards an admittedly sub-RPOL experience, but closer than it was before.

Unfortunately, creating that vision of Dark Reign is going to take time, not only in identification of what are users wanted, but also the time in development of the software so that it lives up to the promise of what it can do.

Errr... But there you go. Just thought that I would offer up a fuller explanation. Either way, full functionalitypretty or notwill be restored very quickly. Whether that is in the old software or the new remains to be seen.

Kage

Ouch

Thanks for the update.

No worries. Something should have happened by tonight, though. Either the butt-ugly Drupal forums at the very least, or Joomla! 1.5 and SMF 2.0 RC3, both of which are a temporary fix until we can get the Drupal install up and running.

Kage

All fixed now